Retail + Digital

Tag Archives: ASOS

ASOS has joined the beauty teen retail party this week with the launch of its own label cosmetics line ASOS Makeup. Part of a wider re-focus on beauty, the e-commerce giant has expanded its online category Face + Body, which now features a huge range (6000+) of branded products, including many newcomers to the site this September.

ASOS Make-up AW17

Fast beauty for fickle teens
Over the last couple of years there have been plenty of teen retail launches from fast fashion players looking to target fickle Generation Z and Millennial customers with even faster beauty offers. Over 90% of girls and 69% of boys in the US aged 9 to 17 are cosmetics users, according to Mintel.

ASOS Make-up campaign

From Primark and H&M to Missguided, New Look and more recently Boohoo, the sector is alive and well with new fast cosmetics product launches that take their design cues from beauty dupe brands such as Kiko, E.L.F. and Nyx. While more ‘hyper-transparency’ focused brands such as Beauty Pie also appeal to this cohort and serve up a more informed, ethical stance that offers a value-led proposition in the same price bracket.

Disruptive commerce
According to a Business of Fashion report (sub req), these types of cosmetics brands are disrupting the distribution model of the market with monthly or fortnightly product drops that focus on SEO driven social media commerce and influencer marketing to drive sales. ASOS has its own network of in-house beauty stylists to help drive this influencer-commerce marketplace and is now in a position to further drive innovation via its new 46-piece make-up line (top and below) that features liquid lipsticks, prime colour eyeshadows and contouring palettes with names such as Decisive, Just Breathe and Overqualified.

Adventures in make-up
‘It is about embracing and expressing the full range of who you are,’ Alex Scolding, head of buying told us at the press preview. ‘We believe your face and body are a canvas, an adventure in individual self-expression. For our customer, make-up is an adventure not a quest, it’s a leisure passtime.’

Attitude marketing
The key in this increasingly crowded retail sector is self-expression and attitudinal marketing. Creative direction and language is less fashion or catwalk influenced, more gender-fluid and tribal nuanced. Niche cosmetics brands such as Milk and 3INA have shown how strong brand community and identity-focused imagery can do the job of visual storytelling.

#ASOSGoPlay campaign launch, Snapchat

Snapchat lens experience (go on, try it!)
It is this adventurous, disruptive mood that ASOS has tapped into with its new Go Play digital campaign that was launched via a Snapchat lens and experiential two-day physical pop-up event in London at the beginning of September. The ASOSGo Play bespoke Snapchat lens is available for 90 days (from 4 September) via an exclusive Snapcode on outdoor media, which lets customers unlock the lens.

The Retail Planner takeouts:ASOS Go Play combines a multi-functional digital focus across social-commerce, augmented reality experimentation and influencer marketing-led experiential, immersive retail. I like the clever phygital approach that shows how physical retail brands should be thinking about digital marketing whether they have stores IRL or not.

Fashion industry chiefs, creatives and media socialites gathered earlier this month for the inaugural WGSN Creative Futures event, held in London over two-days to join the dots between creativity and commerce. Key themes included: phygital media, retail disruption, real-time social feeds and the important of experience by design. Here are my top six takeaways.

1. Entertainment is the new retail

Storytelling has become a key component of the Kate Spade brand equity. ‘Walking into a Kate Spade store is an experience,’ says Kristen Naiman, VP brand creative for the brand. ‘In comparison to shopping online you have to bring your brand to life as a living, breathing brand experience,’ she says.

But, the act of storytelling has to be holistic and true to the brand. ‘There’s been a shift in storytelling – moving away from just heritage to being more cohesive, bringing conversations to both on and offline,’ says Naiman. Now the customer has become a character in the story and she’s had a surge of autonomy. ‘It’s about telling the story in a universal way, so that people can relate to it and see themselves as that heroine. The true value of digital means now people can identify with a brand vision,’ says Naiman.

Kate Spade has taken on humour with its series of films featuring Anna Kendrick. ‘They tell the story of our brand with the central character as a mad cap heroine; women like Carrie Bradshaw, who came to NYC to find themselves,’ says Naiman.

Core customer service is at the heart of the brand experience in-store, says Lou Ashton, head of digital for Topshop. ‘There’s always a base level of brand experience to the customer when they visit our stores – the UX (user experience) is a high priority,’ says Ashton. For Topshop’s partnership with virtual reality specialists Inition during LFW in Feb 2014, the show was very much how we approach digital, says Ashton. ‘The Oculus Rift partnership showed how much we want to democratize fashion week for our audience. Virtual reality (VR) does have a place in retail, as an idea to start off something magical. We want to go to that crazy place, and work backwards to see if it can be sustained in the store,’ she says.

VR is likely to have a place in the store of the future. ‘We’re thinking about how that virtual shopping world could work in our locations. We like to be first with tech, experiment with it, and then make it more relevant commercially.

Tank magazine’s publisher Caroline Issa unpacked how the magazine world is turning phygital. Her mobile scanning app, Fashion Scan brings content on print pages to life with added layers of content, video and interviews. ‘ I want to integrate the physical and digital worlds of fashion magazines in the way oil mixes with ink – we live in an age of melting boundaries,’ she says.

After launching Tank 10 years ago, Issa launched the seasonal Because Magazine three years ago in conjunction with the Fashion Scan app as an experiment. ‘It’s like a pop-up book for grown ups where fashion shoots and ads are digitally enabled and content plays on your device,’ she says. The fashion app scans and recognizes current ads and acts as a diving board for the user to view further video content for each luxury or designer campaign. ‘Video and still campaigns can act in harmony together,’ she adds.

The luxury industry was slow to react to digital progress, especially in the traditionally print advertising medium. ‘It took grass roots momentum such as street style photography and blogs such as The Sartorialist or Tommy Ton, to up the scale of interactive content across magazines and their growing online platforms,’ says Issa. Mobile is the dominant platform now. ‘According to a 2014 KPCB report, video sharing on mobile devices is up 22% year on year and over the last 10 years, mobile and tablet sales have far outstripped desktops. I am in no doubt, the future of digital is mobile,’ she says.

Augmented reality, especially in advertising, hasn’t had a great response yet, it can be too gimmicky, says Issa. But it can work well as an extra layer of editorial. She cites a recent collaboration with Lush Kitchen as a good example of how layered, augmented content can provide a great boost to the storytelling behind a campaign. ‘Fashion Scan allows multiple touch points of content from each page. We have analytics to prove spikes in engagement and clicks that lead to sales online when specific products are mentioned. Our readers return to pages to scan content again and again up to six weeks after their first scan – prolonging the shelf life of the magazine and the ads inside,’ she explains.

Jefferson Hack, co-founder Another Magazine was the first publisher to produce a full LCD screen cover on a magazine. Explaining how he did it, along side the ‘go-to man of Silicon Valley’ Liam Casey of PCH, Hack says he almost gave up after nine months of research and just before he met Casey. The story of the cover video is that it has to be short agree Hack and Casey. ‘Readers have short attention spans, so you have to hold onto that aha moment, you don’t deviate too far from the immediacy of capturing someone’s attention. Rhianna made this work, she’s not just a cover model, she’s a performer, she can move and capture your attention,’ says Hack.

‘There is a prototyping renaissance happening in tech hardware right now. This type of interactive magazine opens doors for publishers to experiment with commerce, exploding the limitations of print and digital,’ says Hack, who adds he’s now looking at R&D in screen tech, ‘thinner and flexible screens are the way forward.’

3. Content to commerce is driving a new circular online retail landscape.

Amazon is a cold company when it comes to customer service. That’s the internal, accepted view according to Stephen Uren, creative director Europe. ‘Customers don’t mind that Amazon is quite a cold company, we’re not warm the way we talk to people, the UX is not great,’ he says. Now Amazon wants to understand who its customers are, in much more depth. ‘We are getting more editorial all the time. We want to talk to our customers. You can’t just be about product all the time,’ he says. ‘We are always looking at how consumer attitudes to shopping online are changing – they are evolving and becoming much more discerning.

Amazon wants to change from being a high-convenience brand to a high-fidelity shopping brand according to Uren. There are certain artisanal products on Amazon Fashion that have not surfaced yet, he says. ‘We don’t have the right tools to show them. It needs to be a much more curated and tailored shopping experience than it is now,’ he adds.

There’s a huge amount of convergence between publishing, e-tailing and retailing says Melissa Dick, new content director at Conde Nast e-commerce and past editorial director at ASOS. ‘It’s easier for retailers to produce content that it is for publishers to become retailers,’ she says. For Stylebop it was easier to invest in content than not. ‘Its less harmful to the brand, if it doesn’t work you can just start again, you can’t say that about holding stock or investing in merchandise,’ says fashion director, Leila Yavari.

Publishers have a responsibility to produce insightful content to capture the reader’s imagination. ‘The role of publisher is to understand your customer and to give them the confidence they need, through whatever content vertical you have available,’ says Dick. ‘That’s the same role for a retailer, understanding their customers’ needs and what they might want to consume next season.’ Yavari defines Stylebop’s editorial content strategy around the seasonal buy. ‘We need to create a message that is a luxury aspirational environment. If you don’t’ have a store then you can create the brand personality through the content.’

The brands that communicate well with their audience will be the content successes of the future, ‘the minute you slap a conversion table on your editorial team will be the minute you fail,’ says Dick. ‘Magazines have started with integrity – many editors are brand ambassadors or influencers now too – so retail brands need to have a similar approach, it’s the same principal,’ agrees Yavari.

Every publisher needs to think about new revenue streams in today’s crowded marketplace. ‘It might be entertainment, it might be experience,’ says Dick. ‘Publishers are looking into experiential platforms, they have amazing brands (eg Vogue Festival). Partnerships of publishers and brands will grow, we will start to see more hybrid platforms,’ she says.

4. Real-time social feeds win the connected consumer’s scroll time

Twitter’s real-time feeds and access to insiders are driving engagement, especially around key fashion events, according to the social platform’s sales lead, Georgina Parnell. ‘We’ve seen huge growth in the way people consume fashion content on Twitter around fashion weeks and events such as the Met Gala. Dedicated hashtags such as #LFW or #MetGala drive conversations. Brands have opportunities from all that passion bubbling,’ she says.

With 54m ‘I want, I need’ tweets per month – there is automatic activation around purchases. According to Twitter’s own research, users are 3.2 times more likely to feel up to date for fashion events. Twitter is real time and consumers love that behind the scenes perspective, says Parnell. She cites recent examples as the detailed multi-photo images from backstage at Matthew Williamson’s show or Burberry’s exclusive #Tweetcam content in real time from its LFW show, when the brand’s exclusive filters for personalized tweets felt very special for the users who participated.

Again during LFW, Topshop partnered with Twitter for a focus on real-time retail trends. When Topshop took live Twitter data from the dedicated #LiveTrends hashtag it monitored key trends such as floral/stripes/70s to link back to product available online and in-store. The results were immediately showcased in stores, where merchandise changed hourly and across all Topshop’s social feeds. There was a 34% increase in sales over the four day LFW period.

During the recent BAFTAs, sponsored posts by House of Fraser led to shoppable tweets for products online that had sold out by the Monday. ‘This closed loop campaign ensured everyone was on the same journey,’ says Parnell.

Twitter’s real-time experience is turning into a live one. ‘Now Periscope is changing the landscape,’ says Parnell. ‘It’s a broadcast app that makes whatever you are doing live to all your users. It has huge potential for fashion weeks.’ She gives the example of Davina McCall (TV presenter) giving a live red carpet commentary on Periscope for the Baftas. ‘Think about how fashion brands can include fans into content – now possible live and immediately on Periscope,’ says Parnell.

Early adopting brands have jumped onto Periscope to experiment with content for followers. For example, Urban Outfitters has broadcast live bands in-store via Periscope feeds and social media influencers including Tom Green and Eliza Licht have taken to promoting their respective latest film/book with live Q&As.

According to the same research, 56% of users say Twitter gives them access to influencers, while 47% of fashion and beauty fans buy from their favourite brands through Twitter.

Everyone has an app in them, but being the first British app to be included on the Apple Watch is an innovative move and something Justin Cooke, founder of music app Tunepics, is used to. Describing his music and pictures app, Cooke says ‘Instagram freed the photo, we want to free music.’ He says the Apple Watch association is a sign of how far Tunepics has come in just over a year, adding it will probably grow through gifting and personalized messages on the Apple device. ‘A social network is only 10% of where we want to be. We have to learn how to evolve the product – we have 2m live uses now, our aim is to connect the world through emotion plus music,’ he says.

Taking a wide view at how brands should communicate with tomorrow’s connected consumer, Jonathan Chippendale, CEO of retail technology specialist Holition says disruption is manifest. ‘Digital has disrupted the retail space beyond recognition, you can’t ignore it as the future,’ he says.

‘Lots of tech is easy to use but it fails to deliver on experience, especially if the retailer doesn’t understand what the engagement value is in the first place,’ he says, adding that so much of it lacks the cool factor in-store, because it’s usually built by technologists rather than people who understand consumer behavior.

‘We finally got rid of QR codes, now my bête noir is just screens. I want to banish them from stores. People already have a screen in their hand they don’t need another one when they look up,’ he says. But there are creative ways of using screens when they provide relevant entertainment, he counters, citing Holition’s visualizing data project in 2014 for Lyst. ‘We provided the God’s eye view, updating Lyst’s data in real time, showing the trends coming straight out of 30,000 purchases per second. We intercepted these pieces of data on their journey around the Lyst network and re-packaged it to provide a visual story.’

The beauty industry has found success with magic mirrors, first the L’Oreal app and now Holition’s own Face app, currently being promoted in conjuction with London College of Fashion and the Savage Beauty Alexander McQueen exhibition. Chippendale says this example personifies Holition’s approach to mixing analogue with digital, to engaging consumer in more personal ways and to move towards a more sensorial technology experience.

Best practice retail has always been about experience. ‘As retailers we walk our customers through five key stages on the journey to purchase,’ explains Guy Smith, head of design for Arcadia.

‘Firstly it’s about an introduction to the brand values; then it’s helping them to browse the store with textured, layered content to help them feel part of the brand; next is the validation stage, that moment when they’re thinking about buying something and you have to create a deep connection; then it’s securing payment, which is where things are changing the most and we are heading towards a mobile first purchase environment. This stage needs to be re-configured, where the current static (tills) model is disrupted and payment is merged with the fitting room experience; lastly it’s the sharing stage, when retailers need to encourage customers to share their experience with friends and the cycle begins again with someone new,’ he explains. He says there is much dispruption in the market and sometimes experimentation is difficult to guage in terms of ROI, but ultimately retailers need to make all of this seamless.

Experience design has to be about fun, says Smith. ‘Shopping is still a major pastime for consumers. Service design (with or without technology) is an integral part of experience design. The right kind of advice is key. It’s the validation part, so capitalize on people and personal service. Experiential design is critical – every time someone meets the brand it has to be perfect, anything less and the brand loyalty is gone.

‘True luxury is still centred on a personal in-store experience,’ says Patrick Grant, creative director of Norton & Sons of Savile Row. ‘The fashion world is increasingly in the business of giving people a total experience that connects them, physically, to luxury,’ he adds. Money buys the opportunity to experience genuine luxury and where human interaction and face to face engagement is required – flying in the face of ‘ubiquitous technology’ according to Grant who is in talks with Vertu to turn communicating via smartphone into a personalized, human experience.

6. Co-collaborators share partnership lessons

Balmain for H&M

Who better to talk about the benefits of designer collaborations than H&M? ‘Our collaborations have a huge effect on the designers now, after 10 years, it puts them on the global map, says H&M’sglobal creative director Donald Schenider. ‘The result is that it’s changed the way people integrate with H&M. It has become acceptable to mix high and low fashion,’ he says.

The relationship between designer and H&M has to be organic, says Schenider, adding it’s a lot of teamwork and a well-oiled machine. ‘Ultimately H&M just wants to be a designer brand for the few hours each collection is in store – the idea is that it flies out quickly,’ he says. While most designers are usually nervous at first, they soon realize the scale of the collaboration. ‘We spend more money in a week than they would all year – and it will change their life.’ (It’s a shame Schenider didn’t spill the beans about the new Balmain collaboration, he was speaking just a week before the announcement!)

One of the fashion industry’s more surprising collaborations is Ekocylce, and the brand’s creative director Adam Derry talked about how the three way partnership between Will.i.am, Harrods and Coke has launched onto the fashion landscape with one agenda: to create innovation in sustainability through design.

‘We believe by leading through design it will be an epiphany moment,’ says Derry. ‘With Coke’s investment in providing post-consumer waste as a base cloth and Will.i.am’s commitment to redefining what sustainable design can look like, it’s up to us as consumers to affect change,’ he says.

The fashion industry needs to redefine waste and recyclable materials for the future. Derry says Ekocyle sees waste as a commodity and a new gold, where the brand plays to its collaborative brand strengths. ‘I love collaboration when its clearly defined, says Derry. ‘We have 130 products at Harrods – that’s a lot of noise about sustainability and design input from three power houses: Will.i.am, Harrods and Coke.’ Derry’s definition of sustainability today is a bulletproof trust record for the manufacturing journey – all practices around sustainability have to be 100% transparent to do it properly.

High street retailers are utilising their seasonal press days for much more than just previewing new collections, now these events are a tool for crowdsourcing key trends both on- and offline.

Arcadia SS15 press day

Major brands such as ASOS, H&M and New Look are employing social media personalisation tactics to entice fashion editors and bloggers down to their press days for editorial commentary, exclusive imagery and influencer-driven content, that in itself is driving brand followers. Here’s a top 10 run down of who had the best social campaigns and activity at the spring/summer 15 press days:

ASOS – obviously ASOS is going to have the most sophisticated digital attraction at its press day, it lives online! Visitors to the 1/1 walk-in digital colour projection and print installation could create their own design (via a series of questions about moods and button pressing) for a personalized poster or t-shirt to take-away. ASOS also profiled its new social-influencers personal shopping service with a series of screens showing YouTube clips, introducing its team of dedicated stylists and their Instagram handles.

H&M – one of my favourite press day attractions (organised by Reverb Events), H&M had everyone channeling their childhood paper-doll dressing activities with pre-cut outfit stickers that could be stuck to photos taken in the pop-up studio. To promote the retailer’s premium Studio capsule range there was a photo-studio and ‘craft’ table to showcase editor’s key picks and finished doll images that were instantly Instagrammable.

H&M SS15 Studio press day #PaperDolls

Kurt Geiger – ‘You had me at Aloha’ was the give-away theme of Kurt Geiger’s evening press event held in Portobello’s Electric Cinema that was part Hawaiian themed festival and part press day. As if the chance to win a trip to Hawaii wasn’t enough pull, there was a grass-skirted Hawaiian band performance, surfer dudes, cocktails in coconuts and blow-up parrots as props for the all important Instagrammed shoes that had pride of place on the sumptuous seating.

Kurt Geiger SS15 #YouHadMeatAloha

Boden – Boden takes the prize for the best VM displays where the springtime message ‘Great Boden in Bloom’, combined with a gardening theme provided the inspiration for colourful creative visual merchandising from carrots to clutches – all housed in a neon pop-up botanical shed.

Boden SS15 press day ‘Boden in Bloom’

New Look – New Look’s press day was merchandised by trend drops and with phy-gital display screens such as ‘Magical Marrakesh’ to advertise each story, the layout was a lesson in editorializing the store floor. With a heavy focus on social media activities, the event featured a photo-booth and beach themed speech bubble placards as well as a ‘postcards from the edge’ story-board highlighting editor’s favourite pieces.

New Look SS15 press day

New Look SS15 press day

Warehouse – via its Tales of the City blog, Warehouse was able to translate an urban online voice onto its physical press day presentation. There were Tales of the City trended rooms, look book imagery and a set of wardrobes that included interior screens playing videos on repeat of the clothes on the rails. The entire VM set will feature in varying degrees in stores and the dedicated video content hi-tech wardrobes will feature in flagship window schemes.

Warehouse SS15 press day #TalesoftheCity

Warehouse SS15 press day #TalesoftheCity

Primark – the cavernous ex-car-park venue meant a huge setting for Primark’s press day – including a vote for duvet set prints station in the homewares area, and a mirrored beauty counter for the new cosmetics range (Poundland watch out) – not to mention footwear wall and trended womens, men’s and teen vignettes. The giant transparent look book images hanging from the ceiling added scale and drama to the setting while the floral selfie-station was a fun execution for a de-rigeur press day activity.

Primark SS15 press day

Primark SS15 beauty press day

Primark SS15 press day

Hobbs – Personalisation and creativity were the driving forces behind Hobbs’ approach to content sharing for its town-house setting press day. As editors snapped and posted their key pieces on Instagram, Hobbs mirrored the visual coverage with a growing collection of Polaroid snaps on a dedicated wall – documenting the most popular merchandise choices throughout the day. How can this be replicated in-store / online?

Hobbs SS15 press day

Hobbs SS15 press day

Oasis – a charming walled garden (and café) was the well-manicured setting for Oasis’ press day complete with water fountain feature, stone pathway and named statues for key outfits. There was even a seedling and gift shop for press day trinkets. A well thought out theme from beginning to end.

Oasis SS15 press day

Oasis SS15 press day

Oasis SS15 press day

Arcadia – It was a full on botanical experience at this secret garden decorated venue, including hidden café and tropical photo-booth for OOTD shoots. Each of Arcadia’s brands had themed tableaux settings ideal for Instagramming key collection pieces. Over the two day event, press waxed lyrical about the Wonderland Events designed setting. My favourite was the free cactus station and the garden-party style café.

Topshop SS15 press day

Dorothy Perkins SS15 press day

Insta-ready

For many, the visual merchandising creativity of tableaux style settings is too hard to ignore. Today’s press days are one big photo opportunity and there were plenty of Instagram-friendly displays on offer at Boden, Kurt Geiger and Arcadia.

Miss Selfridge SS15 press day

Storyboard storytelling

Pinterest-inspired image boards were also great Instagram-bait for retailers encouraging editors and bloggers to post their favourite pieces and start a conversation – both with physical Polaroids (at Hobbs), postcards (at New Look) and storytelling imagery (at Monsoon) as well as mashed up cut-out-and-stick digital iterations of editorial favourites (at H&M).

Monsoon SS15 press day

Shoe-fies

Special mention goes to the shoe-fie stations at Kurt Geiger and Dune, where dedicated image boards (complete with bare-chested surfer hunk at Kurt Geiger) ensured many of the visiting editors posted shoe-fies online.

Dune SS15 press day

Crowdsourcing product ranges

It was the piled up markers at Primark’s press day that got me thinking about how best to utilise all these early collection product reviews. Primark certainly had the volume of editor tags to make a difference to what products go into production and what might get cut, while Gap’s editor comment labels added influencer-style endorsements to products that look set to be popular.

Primark SS15 press day, tagging key pieces

What does it all mean?

Social media democratizes the previously exclusive experience of press days and previewing fashion collections up to three months in advance. Now consumers can see what’s coming up, they can get a head-start on key seasonal trends and ear mark products they want to buy. Personalization could be a major driver for ensuring retailers order the products their customers (and press) vote for after press days.

Perhaps retailers could start to introduce pop-ups in-store and online, for sneak peaks at next month’s merchandise drops. (Spoiler alert: Warehouse is already on it with its Tales of the City press day blog post and Oasis has a similar sneaky peak press day themed post here)

Consumers could start voting for what products they like (and don’t) via apps such as Whichit, that looks and feels like Instagram but gamifies the shopping experience, by asking users to vote for their favourite outfits. This data could easily be transferred into a forward planning tool, that tracks products with the most votes.

A good pop-up still has its place and this one blends a few retail trends at once. For its launch onto the ‘premium high-street’, last week online fashion site Finery London opened a week-long pop-up showroom that mixed physical creativity with digital experimentalism.

Visitors to the tiny Greek Street store could see the label’s resort collection shown on a revolving carousel, set against a backdrop displaying the creative process behind the Finery London team’s design process, eg sketches, patterns, branding ideas. From the street, visitors could swipe through an interactive look book and find a discount code (for early bird shopping) hidden on a screen in the window using motion-sensing technology connected to their devices.

Finery London pop-up store

‘Creating an online audience can start just as effectively with an experience in the physical world, and for an online-only fashion brand like Finery London, we wanted to make the product tangible, visible and highly desirable to Londoners,’ says Thea Frost, partner at Somewhat, the digital agency responsible for the digital concept. ‘The interactive screen mechanic reminds visitors that Finery is a digital brand and allows them to browse as they would on the website,’ she adds.

After trialing the site among early adopters in December, Finery London launches properly on February 5th. With a team comprising of Caren Downie, ex-fashion director at ASOS, Rachel Morgan, former head womenswear buyer also at ASOS and Emma Farrow, until recently Topshop’s design director, the brand’s fashion-forward ethos is well considered. Farrow says Finery London has launched as an antidote to the current lack of femininity elsewhere on the high-street. ‘It’s about flattering the female form,’ she says adding the brand has a London feel but is ‘a little bit quirky and not too serious,’ according to a report on the Business of Fashion.

* This pop-up reflects the retail trend for interactive billboards, that is breathing new life into the pop-up genre. Finery London’s launch onto the market is a clever mix of creative storytelling and digital experimentalism. Showrooming retail tactics blend a physical presence with digital discovery- commerce. By encouraging early adopter shopping on the site through simple rewards, the campaign is a great example of how to utilise social-commerce from the word go.

1 Tinder-style shopping apps are to 2015 what visual-search apps were to 2014. As a new wave of swipe-to-shop apps such as Stylect or Mallzee enter our snacking screen-time, street-style photography influenced browsing will be replaced by the likes of ASOS’s New In app where a constant feed of newness keeps us coming back for more.

ASOS has launched a new personalised shopping service via its own group of online-influencer stylists

2 Augmented mirrors will make shopping for beauty a whole new experience. For example L’Oreal’s Make-up Genius app utilizes the front facing camera on smartphones and through facial mapping technology, the app can augment a range of L’Oreal’s key seasonal colour products onto the users face. If a shopper is using the app at a L’Oreal counter there are also products that can be scanned to instantly test the virtual looks. The 3D virtual mirror works by mapping 64 facial points and can be seen from whatever angle the user tilts their head and in real time.

L’Oreal MakeupGenius app

3 Big data is the new oil: know how to mine it and what it means for predicting product ranges or customer service demands. If consumers are used to giving away preference data for top ten lists on BuzzFeed, welcome to the new era of questionnaire driven, personalized retail eg Birchbox’s live customer data wall in its first physical store or The Fragrance Lab at Selfridges.

4 Wearables to screen your online life: wearable tech in 2015 needs to be functionable, useful & aesthetically pleasing, watch how brands like Altrius by Kovert Designs(new to Net-a-Porter for January) and Rebecca Minkoff are early trail blazers for functional jewellery designs that allow wearers to have their own personal digital detox and tap into the JOMO (joy of missing out) mindfulness trend.

Altrius by Kovert Designs

5 Social-commerce will come of age in 2015 via content curators on Instagram and workaround shopping platforms such as Liketoknow.it that drove 3% of Reward Style’s revenues in 2014 (since launching in March 14). Shopping on Instagram just got much easier thanks to a new wave of apps that know what you’ve liked and can instantly send you links to buy. Also see Shopstyle.it, Insta-Kors and Dash Hudson.